Hemp Is Here

Digitalis; 1985/2013

Find it at:

Music from this release

Musical secrets are still out there, even if they’re no longer hiding in plain sight. The Mutant Sounds blog, so long a bastion of barely-heard esoterica, recently ran into trouble, ultimately deciding to take down the vast collection of free downloads they had lovingly curated since 2007. Mutant Sounds has announced it will continue in some format, although the download archive apparently won't be returning in full, pushing its myriad obscurities a little further back into the shadows. That stuff is still out there, of course-- anything released to the internet never goes away for very long-- but the ghost-like presence of shuttered "sharity" blogs, all emptied of their wares, already resemble thoroughly picked-over corpses discarded at the roadside.

Mutant Sounds mostly traded in obscure, out-of-print, long-forgotten releases; music that was either impossible to find, inordinately expensive, or both of those things. A re-interpretation of "issues pertaining to copyright online" is cited by the blog owners as a reason for removing the files. Perhaps it's wise that they're protecting themselves in this way, even if copyright issues feel like the furthest thing from the minds of artists releasing limited edition cassette-tapes three decades ago. Either way, the biggest loss, other than the free ticket to wallow in some of music's darkest, most mysterious corners, is the fact that a handful of musicians whose work circulated on those blogs ended up getting officially reissued on proper labels. This was a place far removed from rampant piracy. Often, it felt like an invaluable service was being carried out.

The folks at the Digitalis label first came across the work of U.K. duo Leven Signs via a "chance encounter" with a cassette of their solitary album, Hemp Is Here, originally released in 1985. A search of the Mutant Sounds archive brings up a 2007 post for the album, which is likely to have been most people's entry point to the record. In many ways it typifies the spirit of the blog, taking great lurches in style, having scant regard for the world outside, sounding like it was recorded on a piece of old kitchen roll. Sometimes it bears a tiny resemblance to the wider post-punk narrative being spun at that time, especially when clattering, gamelan-influenced percussion collides into the kitchen sink sound of bands like Rip Rig + Panic. But its most overt tie to post-punk is in its desire to tear up music history in order to not sound like anyone else at all.

Leven Signs is the work of Peter Karkut and Maggie Turner; the latter provides vocals that occasionally sound like a less-stern Nico, all buried so deep in the mix that it feels like she's performing somewhere else, in a distant room, with a different band altogether. What Karkut is doing is anyone's guess. There are perceptible organ tones, noises that resemble slide whistles, percussion that sounds like a recording of one of those wind-up toy drumming bears. It's clear that a lot of work and thought went into Hemp Is Here, especially in the tracks where abstract tape loops are laced around one another, recalling the future voyages into playfulness of the Focus Group. There's also a strong sense of junk shop experimentalism later shared by groups like Pram, where everything is thrown up in the air and loosely arranged after it lands.

At times Hemp Is Here shares a sense of discovery with Scott Walker's later works, albeit one executed on a fraction of the budget. Occasionally a male vocal emerges on certain tracks, presumably belonging to Karkut, bearing a deep, throaty abrasion that closely mirrors Walker. Similarly, it's not hard to imagine Karkut mic-ing up a piece of meat and thwacking away at it, just to see where it will take him. That place where Leven Signs ended up is still hard to define, even some 28 years later. But the beauty of this record, and much of the Mutant Sounds family of which it feels a part, is in the feeling of listening to something that fell between the cracks, that perpetually escapes easy definition. Digitalis tracked down Karkut in order to release Hemp is Here, although few details on how this recording came into being are forthcoming. It's a more powerful work that way, carrying around a few hundred imagined histories on its back.